John D. Nystuen

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe a procedure for ordering and grouping cities by the magnitude and direction of the flows of goods, people, and communications between them. Current theories of nodal regions and central place hierarchies provide the bases for the recogni-tion of regionwide organization of cities into networks. These two the-ories were developed by students who recognized that the direction and magnitude of flows associated with social processes are indicators of spatial order in the regional structure of urban society. Whether the flow is local and to the city's hinterland, or regional and to the rank ordering of cities, the notion of central or nodal point is dependent upon the levels of strongest associations within the total flow.